In the field of semiconductor device manufacturing, active semiconductor devices such as, for example, transistors are normally manufactured or fabricated through processes such as those commonly known as front end of line (FEOL) technologies. A transistor may be, for example, a field-effect-transistor (FET) and may be a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect-transistor (CMOS-FET). A CMOS-FET may further be a p-type dopant doped CMOS-FET (PFET) or an n-type dopant doped CMOS-FET (NFET). Different types of transistors, FETs, and/or CMOS-FETs may be manufactured or created on a common semiconductor substrate or semiconductor chip.
Following the formation of various types of semiconductor devices, interconnects for electrical connections of the various types of semiconductor devices may be made or formed in order for the various types of semiconductor devices to operate and/or interoperate properly and to provide the functionalities that they are expected by design. The interconnects for electrical connections may be made through processes such as, for example, those commonly known as back end of line (BEOL) technologies. More specifically, the interconnects may provide electrical connections between, for example, a gate and a source (or a drain) of a transistor and/or among different contact locations of different transistors and/or active or passive devices.
Electrical connections may be made at different levels, such as M1 level, M2 level . . . etc as is commonly known in the art, inside a semiconductor structure. For example, there are electrical connections known as local interconnects that may be made at a level directly above a semiconductor device or devices. Similar to other interconnects, local interconnects may be made or manufactured by a regular BEOL process. However, a regular BEOL process generally requires performing at least most of the essential steps of a damascene sequence including, for example, patterning, exposing, etching, and metal depositing, in addition to the need of creating contact-to-BEOL wiring, in order to complete the formation of the local interconnects. Therefore, with all the different and necessary processing steps in a BEOL process being considered, the existing technology of forming local interconnects is considered by the inventors as expensive, time consuming, and has a high likelihood of increasing the rates of defective devices in a final manufactured product.